Day in the Life of a K-3 Building Technology Specialist

A Day in the Life of a K-3 Building Technology Specialist

From: akdikmens, 1 day ago

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I just tried slideshare. I took all the pictures I took for our presentation and made a powerpoint of my day as a K-3 Building Technology Specialist. It took 36 minutes to compile it! Check it out!

What a jammed packed week!

Hi,

Well, it has been about a week and half since my first blog. Wow! What a week and a half it has been!

Let me start with working on the wii remote interactive whiteboard. The good news is I got it to work! And additionally I was able to videotape myself using it on my home computer and showed the video yesterday at our all day technology staff meeting. But, it took hours to make it happen.

First, Johnny Lee Chung's website was very helpful. Since my computer does not have bluetooth, we had to purchase a bluetooth dongle and install the software. It was very important to make sure to by a dongle that would work with the wii remote. We ended up buying Targus USB Bluetooth 2.0 adapter with EDR. The software was installed but it took many reps before it would recognize the wii remote. It was also noted that after it recognizes the device (and before it connects to it ) a window comes up. One of the boxes you need to click on in that window is "Skip Pairing". This took a while to figure out. It was a major hurdle to get the dongle to recognize and connect to the wii remote. The next step was to read Johnny Lee Chung's "ReadMe" files. It was important to be running .net2.0 and server pack 2.0 otherwise his software would not run.Luckily my computer had this already. Next was a shopping trip to Radio Shack to buy the parts for the pen. The infrared LED cost all of 1.99! My husband was now fully involved and he was the one who thought of using a Sharpie pen. He took it apart and hooked up the switch,battery LED cicuit (Johnny Lee's webiste had a schedmatic for it). I then downloaded Johnny Lee's executable, we positioned the wii remote and were so excited when it worked on our home computer screen. What a blast!

'm hoping now that I can install the bluetooth and Johnny Lee's software on a computer here at school so I can use it on a projected image!

I decided that the best way to demonstrate this was to make a video of it running (since I would have to get permissions to install the software on one of the school computers). My son recorded and my daughter and I starred in the video. I then downloaded the video (.asf) file renamed it to .wmv and brought it into moviemaker to add a title page and do a little editting. From there I uploaded the video onto youtube. Here is the video:

I

New Digital Technologies to Improve Teaching and Learning

This weekend I attended part 1 of a two part class on emerging technologies. There was a lot of good information and now it it time to play and experiment with the many Web 2.0 tools we talked about. And thus I am creating this blog. It is not my first time creating a blog but I am hoping that this time it will give me enough experience to demonstrate and show teachers in my building the advantages to mantaining a blog of their own or how it could be used successfully in their classrooms.

I came home Saturday night excited about igoogle. I love the idea of going to one site and being able to obtain information on many of my interests. Not only that, it has a great "To Do List" section where I can keep track of the most important things I need to do for the day. Also, I was able to add an RSS feed from one of my favorite magazines, Maclean's from Canada. This will make it easy for me to keep updated on current happenings. I am going to see if I can also add an RSS feed from the Montreal Gazette, so I will be able to keep track of what is going on in the town I grew up in. igoogle has tons of different things you can add onto your site. I showed it to two of my children and then went wild with it.

On Saturday, we were also exposed to Johnny Lee Chung's Youtube of using a wii remote to make a very inexpensive whiteboard. I decided that I wanted to copy this video off of Youtube since it is not accessible in our school district. I heard about this previous to class and would like to try to put this together and see how it works. I really wanted to be able to show the video to my principal and the Tech. director. So far I have had no luck at capturing the video. I went to Snapzpro (it was mentioned in class) and downloaded a free trial of All Capture 3.0. It successfully captured the video but no sound. Then I tried a Firefox tool Fast Video Downloader. This captured the sound but It would not play the video. So I am still working on this. I have a wii remote, but still need to get Bluetooth and parts to make the pen. I am hopeful to get it working.

Another interesting tool we were exposed to this weekend is Voicethread. I will have to wait to use it as it requires a USB mouse.

That's it for now. Just glad it is a snow day today!!!
Here's a picture of my yard!